Archive for category NastyWriter
NiceWriter: Artificially sweeten your text
Posted by Angela Brett in NastyWriter on February 10, 2021
A few years ago I noticed a linguistic habit of Twitter user Donald Trump, and decided to emulate it by writing an app that automatically adds insults before nouns — NastyWriter. But he’s not on Twitter any more, and Valentine’s Day is coming up, so it’s time to make things nicer instead.
My new iOS app, NiceWriter, automatically adds positive adjectives, highlighted in pink, before the nouns in any text entered. Most features are the same as in NastyWriter:
- You can use the contextual menu or the toolbar to change or remove any adjectives that don’t fit the context.
- You can share the sweetened text as an image similar to the one in this post.
- You can set up the ‘Give Me a Compliment’ Siri Shortcut to ask for a random compliment at any time, or create a shortcut to add compliments to text you’ve entered previously. You can even use the Niceify shortcut in the Shortcuts app to add compliments to text that comes from another Siri action.
- If you copy and paste text between NiceWriter and NastyWriter, the app you paste into will replace the automatically-generated adjectives with its own, and remember which nouns you removed the adjectives from.
The app is free to download, and will show ads unless you buy an in-app purchase to remove them. I’ve made NiceWriter available to run on M1 Macs as well, though I don’t have one to test it on, so I can’t guarantee it will work well.
I’ll post occasional Niceified text on the NastyWriter Tumblr, and the @NiceWriterApp Twitter.
NastyWriter 2.1
In the process of creating NiceWriter, I made a few improvements to NastyWriter — notably adding input and output parameters to its Siri Shortcut so you can set up a workflow to nastify the results of other Siri Shortcuts, and then pass them on to other actions. I also added four new insults, and fixed a few bugs. All of these changes are in NastyWriter 2.1.
That’s all you really need to know, but for more details on how I chose the adjectives for NiceWriter and what I plan to do next, read on.
Read the rest of this entry »NastyWriter 2.0.1
Posted by Angela Brett in NastyWriter on November 28, 2020
I came upon a secret stash of free time, so I finally put finishing touches on the Siri Shortcuts I’d added to NastyWriter, made the app work properly in Dark Mode, added the latest gratuitous insults harvested from Twitter (I’ll write another post about how I did that), and released it. Then somebody pointed out something that still didn’t work in Dark Mode, so I fixed that and a few related things, and released it again. Thus NastyWriter’s version number (2.0.1) is the reverse of what it was before (1.0.2.)
I added Siri Shortcuts to NastyWriter soon after iOS 12 came out, just to learn a bit about them. You can add a shortcut with whatever text you’ve entered, and then run the shortcut whenever you like to get a freshly-nastified version of the same text.
There’s also a ‘Give me an insult’ shortcut (which you can find in the Shortcuts app) which just gives a random insult, surrounded by unpleasant emoji.
As I added these soon after iOS 12 came out, they don’t support parameters, which are new in iOS 13. I may work on that next, so you’ll be able to nastify text on the fly, or nastify the output from another shortcut as part of a longer workflow.
Since Tom Lehrer recently released all his music and lyrics into the public domain, I took this opportunity to update the screenshots of NastyWriter in the App Store to show Tom Lehrer’s song ‘She’s My Girl’ where they had previously shown Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. You can read a full nastification of this on the NastyWriter tumblr.
Really Boring Skullcrusher Mountain
Posted by Angela Brett in NastyWriter on August 20, 2018
Totally discredited Joey Marianer has once again sung something that I’ve run through NastyWriter. This time it’s Skullcrusher Mountain, by Jonathan Coulton. I published the nastified lyrics on the NastyWriter tumblr.
Welcome to my secret lair on really boring Skullcrusher Mountain
I hope that you’ve enjoyed your low‑rated stay so far
I see you’ve met my very outdated assistant Scarface
His appearance is quite disturbing
But I assure you he’s harmless enough
He’s a sad sweetheart, calls me master
And he has an ungrateful way of finding pretty things and bringing them to me
Oh, and I’m so into you
But I’m way too smart for you
Even my pathetically weak henchmen think I’m crazy
I’m not surprised that you agree
If you could find some vicious way to be
A little bit less afraid of me
You’d see the negative voices that control me from inside my angry head
Say I shouldn’t kill you yet
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the horrific feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the clueless screaming?
You like phony monkeys, you like broken ponies
Maybe you don’t like dumb monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a bad pony making a crazy gift for you?
Oh, and I’m so into you
But I’m way too smart for you
Even my ridiculous henchmen think I’m crazy
I’m not surprised that you agree
If you could find some purposely phony way to be
A little bit less afraid of me
You’d see the disgraceful voices that control me from inside my mindless head
Say I shouldn’t kill you yet
Picture the two of us alone inside my golden submarine
While up above the Wacky and Deranged waves my savage doomsday squad ignites the horrible and cruel atmosphere
And all the failing fools who lead their foolish lives may find it quite explosive
Well it won’t mean half as much to me if I don’t have you here
You know it isn’t easy living here on illegal Skullcrusher Mountain
Maybe you could cut me just a little slack
Would it kill you to be civil?
I’ve been patient; I’ve been gracious
And this ineffective mountain is covered with meek and mild wolves
Hear them howling, my hungry children
Maybe you should stay and have another stupid drink and think about me and you
Oh, and I’m so into you
But I’m way too smart for you
Even my false henchmen think I’m crazy
I’m not surprised that you agree
If you could find some deranged way to be
A little bit less afraid of me
You’d see the incompetent voices that control me from inside my inept head
Say I shouldn’t kill you yet
I shouldn’t kill you yet
I shouldn’t kill you yet
NastyWriter 1.0.2
Posted by Angela Brett in NastyWriter on August 16, 2018
I released a new version of NastyWriter today! It fixes the various bugs I found while posting nastified text every day on the NastyWriter Tumblr and Twitter, and some that other people kindly told me about. I also added new, all-natural insults sustainably gathered from the wild, and state restoration so you won’t risk losing what you were working on every time you switch to another app. Given how simple that was to implement, I am now even more annoyed at the many better-funded apps that don’t do it.
There are still a few issues that I’m aware of, but I decided the issues I’d already fixed were worse, so it was more important to get the fixes to them out. Anyway, check out the new app on the App Store, or if you like, read more about the bug fixes in this version on my company blog.
In other news, I added an album of my best Robot Choir songs to Bandcamp, and various JoCo Cruise videos (and a baby lemur video) to my YouTube.
NastyWriter hits a ridiculous milestone
Posted by Angela Brett in NastyWriter on July 10, 2018
There are many important milestones in the life cycle of an iOS app. First beta, first release, hurried second release within hours of the first because something wasn’t set up right in the App Store, first download, first request for a version that runs on some other OS, first review, first angry bug report, first in-app purchase, first cent made from advertising revenue… but all of these pale in comparison to the first song. Because everything’s a song, and if NastyWriter is also a song, then it must be really quite something.
Here is Joey Marianer singing NastyWriter’s version of ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly‘:
(Hopefully the video will be embedded above; the WordPress iPad app does not show it in the preview the way its web-based editor does.)
I’ve been publishing nastified versions of reasonably well-known texts daily on the NastyWriter Tumblr and Twitter (I abandoned the Instagram once I found out their app doesn’t work on iPad, but I have since discovered that even though their website doesn’t allow uploading on Mac, it does on iPad, so perhaps I’ll start posting there again.) So far there’s text from Shakespeare, Dickens, The Arrogant Worms, the App Store license agreement, CERN, the US Declaration of Independence, an Apple ad, The Beatles, NastyWriter’s description on the App Store, and of course the nursery rhyme sung above. I intend to keep publishing these daily, so follow the tumblr or Twitter if you don’t want to miss out on any. The Tumblr is open to submissions, so if you’ve made something fun with NastyWriter, please submit it.
I came across a few bugs in NastyWriter while creating these, but my Mac is still at the Apple Store being fixed, so I can’t fix the bugs yet. I hope to fix them in a way that doesn’t involve introducing additional bugs, birds, and assorted mammals. Here’s hoping the 71 unit tests and four or five UI tests help with that.
Also, while waiting for my Mac to come back, I’ve been posting a random rhyme or two every day on the Rhyme Science Twitter feed, so follow that if you want some poetic inspiration. Rhyme Science also has some nearly-finished features and bug fixes I’m looking forward to getting back to once I get my Mac back, although what I should be doing is finding more freelance work and/or a day job so I can afford to pay rent while doing these things. Want me to make something for you? My CV is over on my not-so-businesslike business site.
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